The PI of the PREP in Neurodegenerative Disorders lab, Dr. Timo Myöhänen, was invited to the board of Movement Disorder section of Finnish Neurological Society. Movement Disorder section is a forum for neurologists and neuroscientists that are working with movement disorders, and their goal is to further enhance collaboration between the researchers and also arrange trainings and meetings related to movement disorders. “This is a huge honor for me to present pre-clinical research of movement disorders in Finnish Neurological Society”, comments Dr. Myöhänen.

For the Spring 2016, there will be two students working in PREP lab. Sigrid De Lepeleire is an Erasmus student from University of Antwerp, Belgium, and will spend 4 months in our lab. M.Sc. student Tommi Kilpeläinen will prepare his master thesis in PREP lab, working partially with Dr. Erik Wallen of Division of Pharmaceutical Chemistry. Welcome!

PREP in neurodegenerative disorder’s first dissertation was successful and Mari Savolainen has now PhD in Pharmacy. E-publication of Mari’s thesis can be read in here. Mari will continue working in the PREP group for a while as a post-doctoral researcher. Congratulations again and several thanks for our supporters, Academy of Finland, Jane and Aatos Erkko Foundation, Sigrid Juselius Foundation and University of Helsinki!

M.Sc. Mari Savolainen will defend her thesis entitled “The effects of prolyl oligopeptidase inhibition in α-synuclein based mouse models of Parkinson’s disease” on Friday 30.10. in Faculty of Pharmacy, University of Helsinki. This is the first PhD thesis that was done completely in PREP in neurodegenerative disorders group, and the supervisors have been docent Timo Myöhänen and Prof. (emer.) Pekka T. Männistö. The opponent for the defense will be Prof. Heikki Tanila from University of Eastern Finland. Best luck for the dissertation, Mari!

PREP in neurodegenerative disorders will be presenting two posters in SfN annual meeting in Chicago 17.-21.10.2015. PhD students Reinis Svarcbahs and Ulrika Julki will present their data on posters titled “Intracranial chronic administration of prolyl oligopeptidase inhibitor, KYP-2047, counters the behavioural effects and alpha-synuclein overexpression after nigral AAV-alpha-synuclein injection” and “Characterizing the role of prolyl oligopeptidase in mouse nigrostriatal dopaminergic and GABAergic systems”, respectively. Stop by to discuss about our research!

Our recent article in Journal of Biological Chemistry has raised quite nicely interest, and Global Medical Discovery, an online journal publishing abstracts of the latest interesting findings in drug discovery, wanted to publish the abstract of the article as a key drug discovery finding in their page. In addition, we also promoted in general our research topic by adding a short description of our recent results on the abstract. The text can be found in here.

PREP in neurodegenerative disorders -group will be presenting their recent results in AD/PD 2015 congress in Nice, France. The congress will be having over 3000 participants, and all the Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease top researchers will be contributing to scientific program.

Our team will be presenting in two posters, one by Mari Savolainen with the topic “PROLYL OLIGOPEPTIDASE INHIBITION ATTENUATES THE TOXICITY OF PROTEASOMAL INHIBITION IN ALPHA-SYNUCLEIN OVEREXPRESSING CELLS AND IN PARKINSON’S DISEASE MOUSE MODEL” and the other in collaboration with Dr. Henri Huttunen’s group titled “PROLYL OLIGOPEPTIDASE MODULATES ALPHA-SYNUCLEIN OLIGOMERIZATION VIA DIRECT PROTEIN-PROTEIN INTERACTION“.

Since the connection between PREP and alpha-synuclein aggregation was found and published on 2008, one of the mysteries has been if these two proteins interact? When DiDaniel et al. published their findings on PREP knock-out animal on 2009, they also showed that PREP can form protein-protein interactions and its enzymatic activity is not needed for that. However, the interaction with alpha-synuclein, and the mechanism how PREP affects alpha-synuclein aggregation remained unclear.

Now we have revealed in collaboration with Dr. Henri Huttunen’s group (Neuroscience Center, University of Helsinki) that PREP can directly interact with alpha-synuclein, and this interaction is critical for alpha-synuclein aggregation. The interaction was verified by using pure proteins and also a cellular model of interactions. Importantly, we also showed that PREP inhibition modifies the structure of PREP by stabilizing a compact form of PREP that then binds alpha-synuclein tighter to itself leading to decreased aggregation process. The results were published in Journal of Biological Chemistry, and you can read the paper or at least the abstract from here.

Our group has regularly had Erasmus students for research visits, and during the spring 2015 Ms. Patrycja Pabis from Jagellonian University, Krakow (Poland), will visit in our group. In today’s science it is extremely important to have international experience via research visits, and PREP in neurodegenerative disorders group have been an active one in internationalization.

Our group member, Reinis Svarcbahs, has spent 2 months for a research visit in Dr. Brandon Harvey’s lab in National Institute of Drug Abuse and Addiction (NIDA) facilities in Baltimore, USA. The aim of this visit was to prepare certain PREP related virus vectors and the visit turned out to be successful – we have not only the new vectors but also new constructs for PREP gene silencing.

We also got a new master’s student for our team while Saija Tiilikainen started her master’s thesis in PREP in neurodegenerative disorders lab. Welcome, we are looking forward to a good project!